Drowned in the Wave: Democratic Socialism and the Limits of the Electoral Strategy

The liberals are basking in their big blue wave. Last week saw historic victories for the Democratic Party as they won control of both Congress and the Senate while dominating state and local elections. DSA, the largest socialist organization in the country which has now swelled to 120,000 members, also saw historic victories. DSA elected over 100 candidates into office, including Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier of New York City for Congress. The blue wave follows the election victory of Zohran Mamdani in NYC a year ago, whose term in office began in January 2026. These victories have only emboldened the electoral strategy that dominates DSA. The electoral strategy has been hegemonic in DSA ever since the organization’s membership explosion in 2016 following the initial Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. DSA has mostly prioritized election campaigns, mobilizing its members to canvas for candidates in order to elect socialists at both the federal and municipal levels, and ousting right wing Democrats in the process.

The assessment of the electoral strategy is essential for politics today, especially because it is largely a reaction to the movementist politics that dominated the early parts of this century, and especially after the 2008 financial crisis. There were mass protest movements throughout the world, including the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, the 15-M movement in Spain, and so on. Yet the exhaustion of mass protests led political actors to explore the old, parliamentary paths for sustaining radical politics. The Bernie Sanders campaign followed Occupy and Black Lives Matter in the US, the 15-M movement led to Podemos in Spain, Syriza won power in Greece, and figures like Jeremy Corbyn and Jean-Luc Mélenchon became popular in the UK and France.

The mass encampments from October in Spain highlight the question of our moment: that of the relation between a politics that seeks power through the state and a politics rooted in extra-parliamentarian activity. The encampments in Madrid were led by Sindicato de Inquilinas, Madrid’s tenant union, and they were triggered by the eviction of María Abascal, an 87 year old woman, from her home that she lived in since 1956.¹ Will the encampments lead back to a politics that seeks to enter the state? Or will the movement continue to operate at a distance from the state by building power at the neighborhood level?

In the United States, which has also seen two poles form with a statist politics on one end, and extra-parliamentary organization on the other, the former has become the preferred avenue for politics, especially after the electoral victories of Mamdani and other DSA electeds in the last year. While it is certainly possible to make arguments for a strategy that entails both mass organization and electoral intervention, the question would be on the relation between the two. Those in favor of the electoral strategy often presume that mass organization will flow downstream of electoral intervention. They hope that an accumulation of symbolic victories will slowly trickle down into actual “power”, which is frequently invoked in a vague and elusive manner to justify their strategic orientation

The Electoral Strategy

The electoral strategy is defended by its proponents on three levels: narrative, policy, and its ability to cohere a mass movement. In this framework, the starting point is policy: socialists elected into office can pass legislation that will improve the lives of workers. Zohran Mamdani’s election and administration offers the best view into this framework. Mamdani’s affordability agenda, which promises to freeze rent, to make buses free, and to establish city owned grocery stores, is a perfect example of this. Socialists in office can also pass legislation to aid workplace and tenant organizing. As Nick French of Jacobin says,

Mamdani [...] will have many opportunities to help strengthen labor in New York City. That includes using his bully pulpit to educate workers about their right to organize and agitating in support of unionization drives and contract fights (as he has done recently, supporting New York nurses’ contract demands and joining Starbucks workers’ picket line), supporting new city council legislation to make it easier for Amazon drivers to unionize, and fortifying and expanding existing city agencies tasked with enforcing worker protections.²

In this direction, Mamdani has recently launched an office of Worker Power and a Talk to Tenants Campaign, both of which are designed to aid labor and tenant organizing. The potential success of implementing the affordability agenda, and of implementing good policy in general, can function as a propaganda of the good deed. Or in other words, that the potential success of the Mamdani administration will prove to the public that socialism is possible and good. As French says, Mamdani succeeding “will show average people around the city, country, and world that a more just, democratic, and better world is possible, and that democratic socialism is the vision for achieving that world.”³ Successful policy will strengthen the narrative that the electoral strategy is the way to achieve a more just and democratic world. But is policy and narrative a sufficient criteria for success? Is creating a more affordable city, while a positive outcome for everyday New Yorkers, really the task of socialism? And what would distinguish this outcome from progressive liberalism?

French seems to understand the importance of Mamdani’s term in office sustaining the mass movement that led to his election, and invokes Bhaskar Sunkara’s proposal for popular assemblies. In his November 2025 speech at DSA’s biannual organizing conference in Brooklyn, Sunkara, the founder of Jacobin and president of The Nation, grounded the tasks of the Mamdani administration through the end goal of working class self-emancipation. He disagrees with Bernstein’s famous slogan that the end goal of socialism is nothing and that the movement is everything because “if we don’t talk about socialism after capitalism, no one else will.”⁴ His vision of socialism includes “democratic control” of the mode of production and the state, the state guaranteeing social rights, the victory of labor over capital, mass protagonism, and invoking CLR James, a society where every cook can govern. This all sounds socialist, in the sense that if you were to draw up an abstract definition of a socialist society, it would likely include all of these features. But how do we get there? How does electing democratic socialist politicians move us in that direction?

Sunkara followed up on his November remarks, along with co-writer Gabriel Hetland, in December 2025 in Jacobin by advocating for popular assemblies. If his November remarks presented the big picture for socialism, his December article zooms in towards the present with a concrete prescription for the short term. Sunkara and Hetland acknowledge the immense obstacles Mamdani will face, such as “landlords who can derail progressive housing policy, through business interests that shape investment and threaten capital flight, through a political establishment adept at procedural obstruction, and through a state structure that limits mayoral authority.”⁵ Their solution to break through these roadblocks is to cultivate an organized base that can apply pressure outside of election cycles and shift “the balance of power around concrete policy fights.”⁶ Or in other words, an organized socialist movement that can act against enemies to the affordability agenda. “Popular assemblies offer one way to help build that capacity” by “creating regular, institutionalized spaces where ordinary people participate in decisions that affect their neighborhoods and daily lives.”⁷

This is where we hit a speed bump, and it appears when Sunkara and Hetland attempt to bridge the gap between the theory of the popular assembly and its actual construction. The main issue is that they propose these assemblies be created by Mamdani’s administration itself, rather than through autonomous institutions (such as DSA or existing neighborhood groups like tenant unions). They say, “Zohran and his administration will need to actively initiate and guide the process”⁸, which puts all of the onus for building socialism on Mamdani, rather than on mass activity. What happens if he doesn’t create these assemblies? At the time of writing, in the fall of 2026, this has yet to happen. But even if he does create them, what happens if he stops supporting them, or even ignores them?

For Sunkara, socialist power is equivalent to influencing politicians who will allegedly act on our behalf, which is close to the liberal conception of politics and far from his own goals for socialism. This distance would likely be acknowledged by him, but it’s unclear how popular assemblies that are created and authorized by the state will lead to a world where labor triumphs over capital and to general mass protagonism. Marginalization to the sidelines, beyond the potential to “influence” mayors and politicians, doesn’t sound qualitatively different to where we are now — outside of these politicians claiming to guarantee representation through the socialist label. But it’s not clear how popular assemblies actually increase our capacity to act if it’s others that will be acting for us, especially if those others are operating within the capitalist state.

Let’s look at the rental ripoff hearings, which were set up in the Mamdani administration in early 2026, to highlight the problems with this type of politics and style of governance.⁹ These hearings could theoretically allow tenants to air grievances and be given the tools to organize against their landlords. They could function as some kind of popular assembly where people coalesce, mix, and generate new ideas for struggle in the way Sunkara described. Instead, they are authorized by the state and were designed as policy feedback mechanisms. Shamira Ibrahim, reporting for BK Mag, observes this contradiction in the hearing in Brooklyn back in February:

It quickly became clear that what Mamdani’s administration had put into execution was less of an open-forum town hall to express grievances and share struggles amongst tenants, and more of a resource fair that doubled as data collection for various city agencies… Throughout the night, Mamdani’s team stated that the feedback collected would be used to develop policy proposals and recommendations—starting with a report to be generated 90 days after the last hearing and subsequent housing plan, which will ostensibly cover both production of affordable housing and housing quality, including code enforcement. When pressed on how the policy recommendations would turn into actionable legislation, however, Weaver¹⁰ demurred, admitting that the policy change would take time, having to go through the same negotiated process of working with the city council and state budget to make these ambitious goals a reality.¹¹

In this political framework, the people showing up to the hearings have grievances, and the state will translate these grievances into new policies. This perfectly encapsulates the Leninist argument that the capitalist state is a machine that translates class conflict into order, while ensuring the security of landlords’ property and the very existence of class antagonism. This entire operation undercuts the subjective in politics, and instead seeks to place the initiative back on the state.

The “Talk to Tenants” campaign, which is the Mamdani administration’s follow up to the rental ripoff hearings, will send organizers to buildings that have been neglected and to landlords that have frequently violated housing laws and codes to help the tenants form associations. Basically, the Mamdani administration is trying to spearhead the formation of tenants unions. The campaign will be fascinating to observe: will these state-assisted tenant unions have the autonomy to fight beyond the boundaries created by Mamdani to challenge private real estate interests that the state typically protects? Autonomy entails that the unions can sputter out into unforeseen directions, beyond the boundaries of order that the state is usually obligated to maintain.

Would the Mamdani administration, for example, support a rent strike? As Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis say in Abolish Rent, “a rent strike is a crucial tactic of tenant militancy, a weapon with the power to push back against everyday exploitation and win tenants’ demands. It can create enough leverage for poor and working-class tenants to force rich and well-connected landlords to heel.”¹² If the Mamdani administration is serious about supporting and cultivating tenant organization, then supporting a rent strike would be the ultimate test of whether his administration actually supports militant activity, or if they are merely presenting themselves as friends of the people. Activists could begin organizing for a commitment to rent strikes from the Mamdani administration as this program continues to develop.

Does Mamdani Represent a Beginning for Politics?

Despite the limited political vision of contemporary democratic socialism, which carries the same strategic presuppositions as liberalism, one could argue that the exciting part of Mamdani’s victory was the enthusiasm he generated amongst people. Mamdani developed his campaign through a process of inquiry with everyday New Yorkers. He went to neighborhoods that voted for Trump and engaged in genuine discussions with them. This led him to develop a campaign centered around affordability, and it clearly resonated.

Mamdani’s success in generating enthusiasm poses the question of whether his term in office, and the movement that formed around him, could represent something like a beginning for an emancipatory politics, ala Bernie Sanders in 2016.¹³ My wager is that anything emancipatory about the mobilization that led to Mamdani’s election was neutralized the moment he entered office. Not because holding office necessarily means one is betraying the movement they come from, but rather his conception of politics is largely continuous with existing liberalism. It’s a vision of politics that reduces power to the state, and in this case a capitalist state, which necessarily undermines mass politics. If his election victory was fuelled by a movement of volunteers who tirelessly canvassed and worked for him, what will happen to those people now that he’s in office? At best, they’ll jump into other organizing, but the objective of the movement was achieved once he won the election.

We can contrast this with Sanders’ failed primary runs in 2016, where the beginning for politics was caused by its failure. If Sanders won, it might not have had the same impact in radicalizing generations of young people. It likely would have morphed into a version of liberalism, continuing the dominant narratives at the time on the arc of progress. It would have been a vindication of the liberal mindset where things get better over time and that society’s institutions are built for the people. It was precisely Sanders’ failure that exposed not only the limits of pursuing social democracy in the twenty-first century United States, but of the entire liberal mythology itself. Additionally, as Taylor writes, “the reason a beginning of emancipatory politics could occur in a presidential primary is that Sanders was an insurgent candidate. To vote for him was to agree that some form of political organization was needed beyond the DNC. This is epitomized by his call for ‘political revolution.’”¹⁴ Mamdani’s campaign did not represent the same level of insurgency because he ran as a Democrat, while Sanders ran as an Independent in 2016. While Mamdani’s candidacy represented the failure of the Democrats in the same way Sanders’ did, mainly the failure to remedy the escalating crises of contemporary capitalism, his candidacy did not necessarily call the entire party’s existence into question. Rather, his victory could actually suggest a path for renewing the Democratic Party towards a democratic socialist politics that centers affordability. This presents the following contradiction: the success of Mamdani may be the opening for a progressive renewal of the Democratic Party, thereby weakening the prospects of organizing a break with the Democrats under the banner of democratic socialism.

This brings us to an important point about representation. In the US, the notion that politicians represent the interests of voters is ridiculous. Democratic socialist politicians like Sanders and Mamdani excite people because they offer the promise of a return to baseline democratic representation. Yet supporters of democratic socialist candidates are quick to accept that these politicians are limited in what they can do in office and that compromises bordering on betrayal should be expected. In other words, politicians like Sanders and Mamdani project a fantasy of representation, a promise that voters know cannot be kept. The situation is captured by Lenin’s famous line, “the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament.”¹⁵

Now that he’s in office, Mamdani is acting for the people who voted for him, while they disperse back into a state of depoliticized atomization, which Salar Mohandesi argues is the basic state of individual existence in capitalist society.¹⁶ This is a state of solipsistic individualism, premised on the erosion of political and civic organization in our society today, where one is unable to intervene politically on their own. Voting and canvassing for a politician like Mamdani does not give one the power to contest issues at their workplace, to contest issues with a landlord, or to contest larger social issues. The voter outsources this capacity onto a representative who will act within the state, and theoretically the state could alleviate issues in the workplace or with a landlord down the road through policies that would benefit the voter as a worker or tenant. Regardless, to act as a voter is to limit one’s subjectivity. Outsourcing political capacity onto representatives who claim to act for them keeps the individual in their place of political inexistence.¹⁷

We have to draw a line of demarcation between democratic socialism and emancipatory politics. The difference between the two hinges on the question of who is fit to govern. As Asad Haider says:

Emancipatory politics, in my view, begins with a decision. Not some kind of decision about who your friends and enemies are, but a decision about people’s capacity. Are people equal, and are people capable of governing themselves?... Marx was not the first to say that everyone should rule; he was a careful student of the history of politics, and even if he came more and more to restrict his scientific analysis to the specificity of the capitalist mode of production, he understood that the question of emancipation appears across time and across worlds.¹⁸

If socialism is premised on the people governing themselves, the people in power as Huey Newton once put it, then this feels far away from the tenets of the electoral strategy and democratic socialism. Democratic socialism adheres to a bourgeois vision of politics where there is a separation between those who do politics and those who are represented by political processes. In this conception, socialist power is equivalent to influencing politicians who will allegedly act on our behalf, which is really no different from the liberal conception of politics. Democratic socialists avoid the real questions of political and economic power, and the existence of the capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois state is taken as a given.¹⁹

Politics or the Political?

In Can Politics be Thought?, Alain Badiou introduces a distinction between politics and the political. For Badiou, the political refers to the presupposition that politics is about a guarantee provided by the social bond between people and the state which represents them.²⁰ He says, “The polit­ical can be designated philosophically as the concept of the communi­tarian bond and its representation in an authority.”²¹ Politics, on the other hand, is an interruption and exception to the state. Another way to understand this distinction is through Sylvain Lazarus’s distinction between politics in interiority and exteriority.²² Politics in interiority is a politics at a distance from the state, and is based on people’s capacity to think and create new forms of politics. Politics in exteriority are politics which define themself in relation to external objects like the state.

The state is synonymous with order, command, and the status quo. If the state has a structural obligation to maintain order and keep people in their places, then democratic socialists like Mamdani will either have to subvert this or fall in line. Historically, socialist, and even communist, politicians usually fall in line and become absorbed by the state’s logic themselves. As Badiou says, it’s not that politicians or parties are corrupt and betray their voters, but that parliamentarian subjectivity compels certain kinds of governance. He says:

None of the parties which have engaged in the parliamentary system and won governing power, have escaped what I would call the subjective law of “democracy,” which is, when all is said and done, what Marx called an “authorised representative” of capital. And I think that this is because, in order to participate in electoral or governmental representation, you have to conform to the subjectivity it demands.²³

This can be seen in Mamdani’s position on the police. While Mamdani appears aggressive in confronting landlords and other enemies of working people, the NYPD will remain untouched, including its relationship to the Israeli state. This is despite mass emancipatory movements forming against the police over the last decade, most notably in the George Floyd Uprisings of 2020. This is also despite the police, and the repressive forces of the state more generally, serving as a consistent enemy of emancipatory politics. This can be seen in the police beating protestors during recent mass protests or even the United States government using the National Guard to neutralize protesters and strikers throughout the last century. Mamdani even doubled down on his pro-police position in August: “I’ve made very clear that I do not believe in defunding the police, that I will not be defunding the police.” Thus, it’s clear that Mamdani and other elected socialists will embrace law and order (if they haven’t done so already).²⁴ So even if Mamdani was a Machiavellian trickster trying to dupe his enemies and was secretly faithful to communism, this wouldn’t change that his position as Mayor compels him to present himself as a supporter of the police and their brutal, everyday practices (never mind retaining their lavish funding).

The flourishing of the electoral strategy amongst democratic socialists today is just one symptom of the refusal to confront the destruction of socialism in the twentieth century. Many communists, for example, might be tempted to oppose the reformism of democratic socialists with a nominal commitment to revolution. In this vein the question appears as simply as it did over a century ago when it was posed by Rosa Luxemburg: reform or revolution? However, both the revolutionary and reformist strains of socialism were exhausted in the twentieth century. The question of reform or revolution is now inoperative and lifeless. The last century demonstrated that the state is not sufficient for emancipation to be realized, and is actively an obstacle to this. In their decade old article, “The Ends of the State”, Jasper Bernes and Joshua Clover frame the problem of the state as follows: “The problem is not how to seize state power but how not to be seized by it.”²⁵ This observation can extend to both attempts to take control of the state via parliamentary means, the favored tactic of the electoralists, or to insurrectionary theories of seizing state power as seen in many strains of Marxism, and more specifically in Leninism.

The problem of the state, and its relation to socialist strategy and organization, is both historical and theoretical. Historical in the sense that attempts to claim state power, whether through reformist or revolutionary means, resulted in the neutralization of emancipatory politics and the resumption of governmental circumstances by reproducing the separation that defines bourgeois politics: the separation between those who rule (or lead, or participate in politics) and those who are ruled (or lead, or represented in politics).²⁶ Theoretical in the sense that the result of these political episodes have posed new problems for those invested in emancipation. All of this can really be traced back to the crisis of Marxism and the absence of a theory of the state.²⁷

The revolutionaries of the twentieth century largely viewed the state as a neutral entity. This view was inherited from the form of Marxism developed by Engels and subsequent generations which viewed the state as formless. Chris O’Kane says, “this formless theory conceived of the state as a neutral instrument which was used by the capitalist class to direct the capitalist economy — and which could also be used by proletarians to direct the communist economy.”²⁸ This echoes Stephen Smith’s argument at the end of Red Petrograd, where he argues that the Bolsheviks conceived of the capitalist economy and state both as neutral entities.²⁹ The subsequent development of Soviet socialism, and the eventual reversion to a capitalist economy via the NEP and the formation of a party-state which monopolized political power, demonstrated the problems with such a position.

The historical problem of the state shines a light on the theoretical problem. The results of the left seeking change through the state have been heterogeneous: the allures of power may sometimes tempt socialists into behaving like capitalists (SPD), or taking things too far will lead to the armed forces and wealthy capitalists to purge the socialists from within the state (Chile). Even violently eliminating the existing state apparatus doesn’t actually solve the problem as demonstrated by the experiences of the USSR. Translating the historical problem into theoretical terms, we can say that the capitalist state is inseparable from the capitalist mode of production, and attempts to take control of it will lead socialists to get chewed up and spat out by the machinery of the state. Thus Clover and Bernes’ warning that the problem for socialists is really how not to get swallowed up by the state.

Emancipatory politics is not about the state, as the state is necessarily a neutralizing force. If the state is a tool of class domination, and in capitalist societies a tool of domination of capitalists over the masses, then the state will oppose any politics that seeks to end this arrangement. However, the solution to the problem of class domination is not as simple as inverting the elements in the formula. Creating a state which is nominally premised on a domination of the masses over the capitalists was also not sufficient for realizing equality among people. As Natacha Michel says:

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, launched in 1966 and which lasted until 1976, familiarly named GPCR, which was then in full swing, clearly showed that the seizure of power was not sufficient to realize equality among people and could even hinder it. That the class struggle continued under what was called the dictatorship of the proletariat, that the ruling Communist Party did not necessarily represent the revolutionary and proletarian path (again, that’s what it was called back then), and that a second revolution was needed even in the course of socialism itself.³⁰

Returning to communism and emancipatory politics, we can say that communism is its modern form in that it clearly argues for the abolition of the state, private property, and class — all of which violate egalitarian principles. Removing obstacles to egalitarianism is a condition for producing an egalitarian society where everyone can govern. But as the twentieth century showed quite conclusively (and specifically what the GPCR brought into relief), revolution was not sufficient to achieve these goals. Both Lazarus and Badiou sought to confront this impasse head on, and this brings us to the problem of the political subject.

The Political Subject

The absence of the political subject informs our conjuncture. The question of the political subject is not about which sociological group in society will become revolutionary. Or in other words, it’s not a question of identifying a category, such as the working class, that either already exists as the subject of politics or which must become this subject through a process of organization. The political subject involves the fusion of individual subjects into something greater, organized towards a larger goal. The political subject is ultimately a question of subjectivation, which entails that individuals are activated towards an idea that goes beyond them.

The political subject of the Marxism of the twentieth century, for example, was the Party. The Party itself was the fusion of the workers movement and the socialist movement. So while the working class was viewed as the agent of politics, the Party itself was the subject which represented the class and aimed towards something larger: communism. Of course, no communist parties exist today, and the notion of the party as the political subject fell apart in the 1960s as communist parties across the globe proved their hostility to emancipatory politics. The USSR extinguished any form of popular politics that appeared, whether Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Poland in 1981. The French Communist Party was hostile to the student and workers mobilizations in 1968, and worked with the government to neutralize the movement.

Democratic socialism is not interested in the political subject or emancipation. In the best case scenario, democratic socialism is interested in affordability and improving living conditions for working people. And maybe Mamdani and other DSA electeds will even be successful in doing so. But by reducing power to the state, democratic socialism invests in the status quo. Democratic socialists continue to fund Israel, the police, and when the rubber meets the road, they will surely suppress any mass movement that poses questions of equality and liberation. When engaging with the arguments of democratic socialists, it becomes clear that they don’t actually have faith in the larger vision of socialism that Sunkara alludes to. They view the capitalist class as big scary monsters who will swallow them up if they become too bold. They therefore do what they can to appease the status quo, and in the process, foreclose any emancipatory possibilities. We see this in Sunkara’s theory of popular assemblies, which reduces them to policy feedback mechanisms. So far, these popular assemblies haven’t been created. Therefore, even in their speculative writings for how politicians like Mamdani can nourish mass politics, they still default back to the state.

In contrast to democratic socialism, the task of politics today is to carry out the difficult work of producing a militant politics that builds the power of people to control their own lives. As Stuart Hall says, “We need to re-acquire the notion that politics is about expanding popular capacities, the capacities of ordinary people. And in order to do so, socialism itself has to speak to the people whom it wants to empower, in words that belong to them as late 20th century ordinary folks.”³¹ Expanding popular capacity could take place through workplace organizing and tenant organizing, where people try to take control of their working and living situations.³² It could also take place in forms that we haven’t even imagined yet. The point is that politics is about people’s capacity to think and create new forms of politics. As Lazarus says, “the only argument in favor of the possibility of a rupture with the order of things is that the subjective exists, even if it is as adhesion to the order of things. If people think, then another subjectivation is possible.”³³ The electoral strategy, on the other hand, negates this by sustaining a form of politics where people are represented by politicians who will act for them.